Esha Karthiraj, a 13-year-old whose passion for cooking is now taking her to New York to speak at the inaugural TED-Ed Weekend event at TED headquarters.
Today, she has been selected as one of the 20 children from across the world to speak during the event to be organised from December 1-3.A youth and education initiative by TED, TED-Ed was started with the aim of celebrating the ideas of children and teachers around the world. The organization has started a TED-Ed club programme to help students across the world express their ideas in the form of TED-style talks. Esha joined the club about three years ago with the help of an institute named Sparkling Mindz in Bengaluru.
I feel that people look at cooking simply as an act of survival – you cook, you eat the food, and that’s pretty much about it. I look at it from a different perspective. From a young age, I saw my mother and grandmother cooking, and also found myself surrounded by cooking shows on TV and YouTube, etc. It really fascinated me because cooking is so much more than an act of survival – it has creativity and innovation. People would say that you can’t mix things like chilli and chocolate because apparently, it just doesn’t work. I wanted the break the so-called rules so I just tried it and found it to be good,” says Esha Karthiraj.
A shy student from the beginning, it required a lot of perseverance on her part to emote herself the way she wanted to. That was also one of the reasons why her mother, Rakhee Prabhudesai, enrolled her in the programme. “Before joining Sparkling Mindz, I was really shy. I was the kind of kid who would just sit behind in class and act like she is listening to everything. I was so quiet; I didn’t know how to communicate my ideas. I didn’t talk to the people in my class until a good month or so after I joined school. My mom realised that this could be a problem later in life,” she says.
The pre-school programme works on the Reggio-Emilia play-based methodology that is inspired by the fact that kids like to play with things they get in their hands. And in that process of playing, they are leaning too; so one can create a play-based structure to enable children to learn.“It’s a really interesting programme. I really like it. It is different from other schools because children interact with the teachers not just to get the syllabus done and get out of the school. The goals of the teachers are different. They don’t even call themselves teachers. They are called facilitators because they learn with the kids. It is really amazing and fun,” says Esha.